Jay Craven's 'Northern Borders' film continues Vermont screening tour

Craven, students, learn from creating 'Northern Borders'

Apr. 11, 2013

Director Jay Craven (right) watches a scene on a monitor during filming of 'Northern Borders,' based on the book by Howard Frank Mosher. The completed film, for which Craven employed Marlboro College students, will be screened in Burlington next week. / GLENN RUSSELL/ Free Press

Jay Craven’s latest project, “Northern Borders,” is a feature film starring a pair of Academy Awards nominees. It has also been an educational experience, as the bulk of his crew for the Vermont-made film came from colleges throughout the Northeast.

On both levels – the cinematic level and the scholastic level – Craven is a happy man.

“I think it was great. I wouldn’t trade it. I’m planning to do it again,” the Northeast Kingdom filmmaker said in a phone conversation Friday. “I felt it was my best production experience with all of the links and sense of community that developed. It was also my best educational experience.”

Craven teaches at Marlboro College and filmed much of “Northern Borders” near the southern Vermont school that helped fund the film. His crew of 47 included 32 students.

“You assume that the students can reach beyond their grasp and function as peers, and they did,” according to Craven. “Does that mean there were more continuity problems? Yes. More soft focus? Yes. But it didn’t harm the movie and it was part of the price that was to be paid for inexperienced people reaching beyond their grasp.”

The final result of Craven’s hands-on lesson in filmmaking last spring is ready for its close-up this spring. “Northern Borders” began six straight nights of screenings Tuesday in Marlboro and Wednesday in Brattleboro. The tour continues tonight in Bellows Falls; Friday in Montpelier; Saturday in Burlington; and Sunday at Lyndon State College.

Filming Mosher's Northeast Kingdom

“Northern Borders,” starring Oscar nominees Bruce Dern and Genevieve Bujold, is the fourth installment in Craven’s series of films based on the novels of Northeast Kingdom author Howard Frank Mosher. Craven previously filmed “Where the Rivers Flow North” with Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox; “A Stranger in the Kingdom” with Martin Sheen and Ernie Hudson; and “Disappearances” with Bujold and Kris Kristofferson.

Those movies were made predominantly with professional crew members but also cost Craven a relative fortune in the independent-film world — $1.7 million alone for “Disappearances” in 2006. He said on the set of “Northern Borders” a year ago that a movie made with a volunteer student crew “is sort of the last idea I’ve got” for making films in Vermont.

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He said Friday that “Northern Borders” came in just under his budget of $500,000, though he still needs to generate about $60,000 to cover costs, “which is frankly the best position I’ve ever been in editing a film.” The $25 admission fee for this week’s screenings, he said, as well as a planned 100-town “Northern Borders” tour starting in June should cover that cost. Donors can also still contribute $180 or more toward the film to get their names in the film’s closing credits.

Craven acknowledged that there were some bumps along the way with his student-heavy film crew. Footage from two days of shooting with digital cameras was corrupted and had to be re-shot, and other digital files had to be repaired at a cost of $5,000. A student at New York University planned to take a semester off to help Craven finish editing but returned to NYU near the last minute, leaving Craven to handle more editing than he expected.

Making it work

Because there were issues with continuity and soft-focused shots, Craven wound up with less material than usual; he said he likes to have 17 minutes shot for every minute he uses in the final version, but for “Northern Borders” he wound up with a ratio closer to 11 to 1. That meant he had to get creative about how he put scenes together.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I knew going in, ‘Here are some of the compromises you make in lower-budget filmmaking in general.’”

Craven said the students were conscientious and hard-working. Often, he said, he’s working on a film largely by himself, but he regularly had 25 crew members at a table to help fine-tune scenes, performances and script.

“There was constant dialogue. More people were conversant with the nature of the drama and the characters than ever before, and that was helpful. When you’re sort of thinking through it alone you lose that additional perspective,” Craven said. “You get a little bit sometimes too much in your own head.”

Alison Pugh served as the sound-boom operator for “Northern Borders.” She’s a 21-year-old junior from Tamworth, N.H., majoring in film studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

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“It was a fantastic time for me,” Pugh said in a phone conversation Friday. “This was more valuable than any internship you could get.”

Pugh said her work on “Northern Borders” allowed her to make connections in the film industry through the professional crew members, and she loved being immersed in film by working with and living among other students gathered in Marlboro for “Northern Borders.” She said it also helped to leave her collegiate setting and see how filmmaking is done on the professional level.

“It’s so exciting. You’re always working on student films and have such grand plans and it never looks like you want it to,” Pugh said. “I think it was great for students to see that eventually you’re going to make something like that.”

Craven said he’s already planning another movie leaning on student crew members. He’ll start making a film version of the Guy de Maupassant novel “Pierre et Jean” in Vermont and Massachusetts in early 2014. (Craven said the Bay State’s film-incentive program could save him $150,000 that he won’t have to try to corral with fundraising.)

He also hopes to bring “Northern Borders” to film festivals and explore deals with Netflix and cable and Canadian television. Before that, though, comes this week’s tour, the first time “Northern Borders” faces an audience. Craven isn’t sure what to expect.

“The part about being a regional filmmaker is that I get to share these films with the audiences who are closer to the cultural and character aspects of the stories, and that’s always nourishing and instructive and sometimes daunting because people can call you on stuff,” Craven said.

He also said, though, that he’s “pretty satisfied” with the way “Northern Borders” turned out.

“The films are like your kid,” Craven said. “You love them and you also know that some are more capable of making their way in the world than others.”